http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/65085 wrote:It appears the rumor that Valve and IceFrog are working, specifically, on a new version of the popular "Defense of the Ancients" WarCraft III mod has a bit more weight today as a trademark filing for "DOTA" by Valve has surfaced (via Superannuation).

The mysterious IceFrog joined Valve last year and was put in charge of a team. While blog posts made by the developer indicated that his project at Valve would be of specific interest to DotA fans, it was uncertain if the project would retain the name or even be the same type of game. The project could just share the name or could be a full port.

If I had to speculate (I do), I would predict a free-Steam release of DOTA that is a re-balanced, re-tooled version of the WC3 mod with full Steamworks integration. It will be interesting to see if the backend features match those of Heroes of Newerth, which added several desired features like stats tracking, VoIP, and game re-joining.

Shacknews has once again asked Valve for a statement, but has not heard back. They're probably busy playing DotA...

Well they're definitely not lying. The patent is up the US Government's Trademark Applications and Registrations Retrieval website.

DotA has always been treated differently then a normal mod, but if a WCIII engine game is coming to steam and being integrated with SteamWorks like ShackNews speculated, will Blizzard have anything to say about it? Especially considering Steam competes with their new Battle.net 2.0 service.

More importantly, this seems to be Valve's first step out of the shoot-em-up genre. I wonder if Gabe is going to make that MMO for the Wii he expressed interest in awhile ago.

I'm willing to bet it won't be in the WCIII engine. In fact, I expect we'll be seeing more of the fruits of valve working in an overhead view with source (Alien Swarm being the first). Much like Alien Swarm, I think DotA is going to be a complete remake and expansion of the original mod, rather than a mere re-release.

I doubt Blizzard would have anything to say about it as long as Valve edits certain things (bits of DotA lore that tie into Warcraft III, some names etc). Blizzard and Valve aren't competing, as Battle.Net was created only for Blizzard games, unlike Steam which is a true gaming platform.

My main concern is with any possible conflics between the studios who made Heros of Newerth and League of Legends, both of those "endorsed" by Icefrog, and Valve. The main draw of DotA to companies like Valve is the MASSIVE (est. 6 million) player base DotA has, HoN, LoL and DotA had already split that a good amount, I'm afraid Valve might get cold feet down the line if investors start to worry or the project starts to cost too much.

Agreed, while they did get the name rights it is just so they can make a game with a title true to its original form.It will probably be in the vein of AS but of course in the style of DOTA, possibly even a fantasy game.

Contact. The EU welcomes the pain free. That's emotional impact.I actually think limitation is good for creativity. If we had an engine that could do everything, we would be in trouble. It gives us focus. ~~ Randy Lundeen

Uhh hey guys...You like cut out 60% of you're game.... wth?Like i mean you took out entire areas....

Wait why? flat Characters? There was an Ocean... and you were worried about character being flat?wtf!

Contact. The EU welcomes the pain free. That's emotional impact.I actually think limitation is good for creativity. If we had an engine that could do everything, we would be in trouble. It gives us focus. ~~ Randy Lundeen

In all seriousness though, I am unsure about the *legal* aspects behind this purchase. As far as I know, Icefrog was not the original creator of Dota and only took control of the DotA team after the old leader Guinsoo had departed from the company. If I were Guinsoo, who I believe works for riot games atm, I would probably argue the legality behind this trademark, specifically since neither Icefrog nor Valve developed or constructed the original DotA and thus have no right to truely trademark it.

Trademarking "DotA" also seems kind of retarded to me in some sense, since this means that valve probably plans on naming the next game DotA as well, instead of DotA2 or DotA:InsertSubtitleHere. It'd be like if they made Team Fortress 2 just called Team Fortress, or if they even called Team Fortress Classic Team Fortress. (Whoa, weird sentence, but I think i've made my point.)

It's obvious that Valve developed Alien Swarm as a test for this upcoming DotA game, and wanted to do a public test of some of the basic control and see how people responded to this new perspective in the source engine.

Also, Battle.net and Steam aren't necessarily competing platforms. Battle.Net isn't publishing third party content nor is it an application that runs on your computer that manages a game library. Battle.Net 2 is only there to do what the old battle.net did, but expand upon it with things like matchmaking and some other nifty features... And also a lack of basic features.

trcc wrote:It's actually very fun Valve is making a good move. Stupid Blizzard will regret it!

I believe blizzard didn't necessarily "drop the ball" on this deal, instead what happened was that Icefrog decided to join Valve.

Honestly, I have a huge mixed feelings about this new DotA. First of all, Valve will have to beat LoL and HoN, Which are both very VERY good versions of what is DotA. In order to have a DotA style game that actually stands out, I feel valve will actually have to try pretty hard to make sure it stands out in one way or the other. And to have to keep the DotA name, I feel they have a huge reputation to fulfill. The game will have to be very competitively balanced, and will even have to live up to the original title as well as blizzard did with SC2, which is actually a very hard task to do when it's game as idealized as SC2 or DotA. And so far, Valve doesn't really have a good track record when it comes to fulfilling what the competitive leagues and players want (I.E. CS:S and CS1.6 having their competitive leagues die out because of their lack of attention / constant patching.)

So overall, my thoughts are mixed in opinion. I feel if they had just made another DotA style game with a new name, they wouldn't have this issue of living up to the hype.

I think we all or too fast to assume that because they have gotten the DOTA name that they HAVE to absolutely fill in its shoes. (In the sense that it needs to be the same thing, not that it does not have to fill in the whole DOTA style.)

But competitive play is an interesting subject, while i don't know much on what happened in the CS/CSS scene.I think Valve understands that and is the reason they hired Icefrog(?), They know that they need to fill in the competitive gameplay. (Of course they also wanted the guy who made it in the first place.)Being Valve though they also have a large user base to please, which includes people who don't care as much about competitive play.

My final decision is until we see more info, I trust Valve to understand the prime user base that this game is expected to please.

Contact. The EU welcomes the pain free. That's emotional impact.I actually think limitation is good for creativity. If we had an engine that could do everything, we would be in trouble. It gives us focus. ~~ Randy Lundeen